


When We Weren't Enemies

by ncfan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rise of Empire Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon Speculation, Childhood, Gen, POV Female Character, Sister-Sister Relationship, Sisters, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 06:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9706262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Peace was something elusive for them both, difficult to grasp and easy to lose, but even for them, it could be found from time to time. A moment in the chidhood of Satine and Bo-Katan Kryze.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Since we know approximately nothing about the Kryze sibling who was Korkie’s parent, said sibling is Dame Not Appearing In This Fic. Also, regarding the age gap between Satine and Bo-Katan. I’ve seen statements that seem to imply that the two are either twins, or at least very close in age, but looking at the two of them, it seems to me that even though they have both physically stressful occupations, and Satine has the occupation that would arguably be more _psychologically_ stressful, Satine still looks much older than Bo-Katan, even accounting for that. Hence the six-year age difference I went with in this fic.

Tonight, there was no light to pierce the dark but the stars, the waning moons, the winking little lights in the watchtowers, and the faint glow on the southwestern horizon—the nearest town, about fifteen klicks away. Tonight, there was no noise but the wind rushing unimpeded over seemingly endless stretches of treeless, sandy grasslands, and the sea booming against the rocks and the base of the cliffs. Her father had gotten a message confirming the cease-fire ( _Our victory, sir; the heads of the other clans will swear fealty in Sundari_ ) a week ago, but the news had not felt real to Satine until she had climbed up out of her home, and stood in this dark, quiet night. She’d not been out at night _before_ often, but often enough to know the signs of night battles, and the silence spoke of peace.

Bo-Katan had said she wanted to see the stars. Since Bo-Katan never did anything by halves, she’d not related this request to her older sister, or to any of her teachers, nor even to a guardsman. With all the confidence of an eight-year-old child who either did not realize or did not care that her father still worked late into the night, she’d gone into his office and asked the man himself. Satine knew—she was there, delivering a status report that had just come in from one of the guard stations on the borders of their lands.

And without so much as looking up from his reports, their father had said that she could—but _only_ if Satine agreed to go with her, and if the two of them would not pass beyond the perimeter of the watchtowers.

Their father managed not to notice the glare Satine shot at him, which was a disappointment, for she had been refining it for the better part of two years now. It was the same glare their mother had turned on him when he had agreed to let _his_ mother’s kin foster his second daughter: _Why did you make this decision without consulting me first?! I don’t care if they wanted a favor before they would formally ally themselves with us; she’s my daughter too!_ Even Satine’s father had wilted under the force of that glare, and Satine had been modifying it to work for someone who did not have endless reserves of maternal wrath to draw upon. But neither Satine nor Bo-Katan had seen their sister for a little over two years—nor their mother, for that matter, as she had felt her second child needed to have at least one of her parents with her. And Satine just couldn’t bear to…

She really should have just said ‘no.’ Bo-Katan had pulled a muscle during combat training and was walking with a slight but noticeable limp, even if she tried so stubbornly to hide it. It was late, they both needed their rest, and Bo-Katan probably needed to check in with the medical droid again before going to bed. But really, Satine just couldn’t bear to…

“Of course,” and after Satine went and pulled a blanket off of her bed, they were climbing the stone steps out of their home, and into the chilly, windy night. Sleep would have to wait until a later time, it seemed.

Satine knew about the cease-fire; truly, she did. She’d heard the message firsthand, more than once; first the private confirmation, next the public one that had inspired deafening cheers and the uncorking of more than a few bottles. She knew the signs of a quiet night, and she knew full well that the household had been in a flurry of packing for days now; her room was down to a bed, a chair, and a blaster and a vibroblade. But still, her first instinct upon going outside, even with all of this in mind, and the watchtowers _and_ a taste of smoke-free air, was still to scan her surroundings with narrowed eyes, forgetting even to wince as a chill wind cut right through her. Realizing that nothing was out of place made her feel more tired than it ought to have.

“We can’t stay out here for long,” she said to Bo-Katan, smiling down at her younger sister in such a way that only a few were guaranteed to spot the strain in it. “We both have to get up early tomorrow. And stay close to me.”

Unfortunately, Bo-Katan happened to be one of those people who knew Satine well enough to spot the strain in her smile. Her pale, smooth brow suddenly gained a few furrows, and her eyes, their color washed out to gray in Kalevala under night, narrowed. “I know, Satine.” There was something happening with her mouth that wasn’t quite a scowl, but clearly felt it had the right to _become_ one if it didn’t like the way things were going. “I don’t want to look forever. Just for a while.”

“I know,” Satine replied, and when she smiled again, she turned her face away from her sister.

They found a lump in the earth a-ways out from the very top level of their home (the only one that opened to _sky_ ); just an oversized lump of soil and sand and grass, plus a couple of inconveniently-placed rocks, but it was large enough to provide shelter from the wind if you leaned up against it, facing the right direction.

Satine knew people who would have said that, having gone out into the cold night, it was her and her sister’s responsibility now to simply weather out the cold. However, Satine believed in staying healthy before she believed in things like that, and that meant warding off the cold. The blanket she had hastily yanked off of her bed was meant to fully envelop a fourteen-year-old lying stretched out in bed, so it had no trouble enveloping a fourteen-year-old and an eight-year-old together if they were sitting up and not lying stretched out. True, with one end of the blanket wrapped around Satine’s left shoulder, only the top of Bo-Katan’s head was left exposed, the blanket had to be held open for the younger to be able to _see_ , and from a distance, most wouldn’t have noticed Bo-Katan was there at all, but that was primarily because Bo-Katan’s coppery hair was nearly identical in shade to the blanket. The blanket did its job, at least; it trapped heat under its folds, and shielded against what little gusts of wind found their way to this side of the lump of earth.

Satine could barely guess if the roaring in her ears was the wind, the sea a couple of klicks away, or her own blood. So this was over, was it? How long would that even last? She’d heard _‘The war is over’_ twice before in her life, and inevitably, warriors would starting shooting their blasters again a few months later. Smoke would fill the skies of Kalevala, she would have to go underground again, and her world would shrink, little by little, both in terms of area and—people.

She couldn’t remember why this war, or either of the other ones fought in her lifetime, had started. No one had ever told Satine the reason why, and she was afraid to ask, if only because she feared that whomever she asked would look at her in vague confusion, shrug, and answer, _“I don’t know. It’s not important.”_ Certainly, no one around her seemed to _care_ much about why the clans fought one another.

 _We’re Mandalorians_ , Satine thought wearily. _We don’t need much of a reason to fight one another. We don’t need much of a reason to hurt one another, kill each other’s children, make peace, and then start the whole miserable cycle all over again._ Her right hand curled open and closed under the blanket, remembering the phantom pressure of a small hand on the palm, that which would never come again.

Lately, though, she had been thinking about _reasons_. She’d been thinking about them quite a lot, to the point where ‘thinking’ was translating into arguments with her father, who thought his heir would have done better to ‘think’ about something more productive. But Satine couldn’t control the tracks her mind walked down, and had no intention of trying. She was a child of Mandalore, and though her heart might not hunger for battle, a warrior’s perseverance was something she could manage with ease. If Satine was to be any kind of chieftain who deserved the title, she would have to think long and hard about reasons.

Satine’s gaze turned slowly to Bo-Katan. For once, Bo-Katan, typically hyper-aware of scrutiny, seemed blind to her sister’s eyes on her. Instead, her face was turned towards the (thankfully clear) sky, her eyes fixed upon the stars. Something of the near-constant tension in her muscles had relaxed minutely. Bo-Katan had learned the lessons of carefulness and care _less_ ness just as Satine had, and Satine wouldn’t say she looked at ease, but in this light with that expression, Bo-Katan looked almost… soft.

As incongruous a term that seemed for either of these Kryze daughters.

But the stars had held an undeniable appeal for Bo-Katan since her earliest days, and perhaps she simply forgot where she was, who she was, when she looked at them. (Satine recalled stories of people who loved the stars too dearly, and tried to forget.) _Or it could be the simple pleasure of being outside,_ Satine allowed. Bo-Katan had been born into war, and they had endured war after war together. Bo-Katan had spent half of her life underground, going months at a time without seeing sun or moons or even _sky_. The number of years was lower for Satine, but even she had felt the undeniable restlessness of being confined in a place where the air was close and still and growing increasingly stale. Never knowing when it would be safe to come out, or if she was simply going to die down there. It made every breath of fresh air a joy and a relief, even if there was smoke and gas to make your lungs _scream_.

For her sister’s sake, Satine hoped that this would be the last war—for a while. The state of affairs being what it was, she knew that it was too much to hope for that war would not come again in their lifetimes. War was the shadow that dogged the steps of the Mandalorian people, and that faithful shadow would always be there, clinging to their heels. The embers of old grievances would be fanned back to full blaze, new grievances would spark an inferno, or maybe the clans would truly fight one another _for no reason at all_. For that to change, something else would have to change.

(It was an odd thing to come from the mouth of a fourteen-year-old, but Satine felt old. She felt old in her muscles and her bones, though her youthful mind had no trouble conjuring a teenager’s energy. There was precious little fire left in her—there might not have been much to start with—and she wondered, sometimes, what it would take to get it burning bright again.)

“How many are there?” Bo-Katan asked suddenly, her gaze still fixed upon the stars.

Jolted out of her winding thoughts, Satine couldn’t find a voice to answer. Bo-Katan wrinkled her nose at her and said, peevishly, “The stars, Satine. How many are there?” _How tired_ are _you?_ clung to the underside of the spoken words.

Satine leaned down a little, careful not to dislodge the blanket. “Well,” she said carefully, “I don’t know the exact figure. No doubt someone has recorded the number of stars in known space; we could check once we’ve gone back inside. However…” Satine smiled a little wistfully. “…When we look out at the night sky, we aren’t just seeing stars in known space. We’re also seeing the other planets in the system. We’re seeing stars from beyond the edges of the star charts, galaxies so far away that to the naked eye, they appear as nothing more than a single star.”

And what possibilities they had, those distant stars, those far-flung galaxies. There they were, undefined, their futures fluid and capable of changing in the blink of an eye instead of the toil of a lifetime.

But Bo-Katan had latched on to ‘places’ more than ‘stars’ or ‘galaxies.’ “Father’s said we’re moving. No one’s told me _where_.” Frustration bled into her thin voice.

Satine bit back the first explanation that entered her mind: no one had told Bo-Katan ‘where to’ because even with the cease-fire, they were all holding their breath, waiting for hostilities to erupt again. “Our house won this war, Bo-Katan,” Satine told her gently. “That means that Father now rules over all the clans. We are relocating to Mandalore so that he can do so more effectively.”

“The homeworld?!” Bo-Katan exclaimed, and there was a bright, welling excitement in her that Satine hadn’t heard since their father had decided she was old enough to begin combat training. “We’re really going _there_?”

They had been raised to revere the homeworld their ancestors _broke_ as much as any Mandalorians. Satine herself was only beginning to grasp the hypocrisy she would later believe inherent in anyone who could claim to love a place and then proceed to poison it. For now, she smiled and nodded. “Yes.  We’ll be ready to leave before the mouth is out.”

Meanwhile, she was trying not to think about impending language lessons. Their parents had always insisted they be well-educated in this regard, but Satine had gotten wind of a need for them to put aside Kalevalan Mando’a in favor of Sundari Standard. The people would expect this of them, her father had said, with the easy confidence of a man who could already switch between the two dialects as easily as he could breathe. Sundari Standard sounded like it was missing about half the alphabet, and even more like it was being spoken by someone with a life-threatening head cold. But the more she looked at certain documents that had been sent here from Sundari, the more Satine realized that she wasn’t going to understand half of what anyone there said to her unless she learned their dialect.

(She could already guess what future difficulties would arise. There would be times when stress would overwhelm her and she would slip back into the cradle tongue—her Huttese tutor had warned her that unless she maintained _stringent_ control over her emotions, this was almost certain to happen at least once. She would hear a word exclusive to Sundari Standard and not understand. Grammatical errors born from the slight differences in verb conjugation; they would make her look childish and immature. Times when words would form in her heart and her tongue would simply—fail her.

The one good thing, Satine suspected, was that she would be able to curse in her home dialect without anyone from Sundari understanding a word of it.)

“The stars will be different, won’t they?” Bo-Katan’s voice was flat as the broad side of a kitchen knife, with no inflection beyond that of dull, begrudging acceptance. “The constellations, too.”

Satine nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

What she hadn’t told Bo-Katan yet, what she suspected no one had told Bo-Katan yet, was that it wasn’t just the stars and constellations that would be different over Mandalore. Part of Satine’s duties entailed monitoring her sister’s history lessons, so unless Bo-Katan was receiving information from a source other than her history tutor, Satine knew exactly what she did and did not know of Mandalorian history.

What Bo-Katan knew was that centuries of warfare had rendered Mandalore completely unlivable outside of its cities. There had been treaties hammered out that specified certain weapons to be banned by use during clan wars, and it was a sign of how truly desperate the situation had become that every house and all the clans had assented. However, these treaties would come too late for Mandalore (And too late for shattered Concord Dawn, for that matter).

Outside of greenhouses, noting grew on the surface of Mandalore anymore. Every non-sapient animal species indigenous to the planet was either extinct now, or destined for extinction within a few decades, even if they were exported to worlds with healthy ecosystems. The polar ice caps were gone, melted away long ago. The rivers were either dried up, leaving their dry beds behind to scar the surface of the planet further, or were so thoroughly poisoned as to make mere skin contact unsafe. Whole mountain ranges had been leveled, though some still remained, greatly diminished. Now, the surface of Mandalore was coated only with pale sand that had soaked up so much radiation that, on its own, would take millennia to dissipate. The wind carried nothing but dust and the whispered laments of centuries of ghosts. Step out into it without proper protection, and it wouldn’t be too long before you began to sicken.

What Bo-Katan likely did not know, unless she was playing her cards very close to her chest indeed, was how anyone managed to survive on poisoned Mandalore. What Bo-Katan likely did not know was that the people of Mandalore, those who lived on the homeworld, could only survive by doming their cities, sheltering them under tons of metal and air filters that required near-constant maintenance. It was understandable that Bo-Katan did not know; the combination of this shelter being necessary for survival and the excesses that had made it a necessity in the first place were considered a great enough embarrassment that the information was not widely disseminated. Outsiders who had not been to Mandalore rarely knew about it, and even Mandalorians who had not been to Mandalore were not entirely guaranteed to be in the know.

But living in Sundari would be a kind of going back to living underground. That which cut them off from sky, sun, moons and stars would be metal and not earth, but they would still be cut off. Oh, they could still find a place where they could see the stars and constellations. In place of the broken shield, the spider-flower, the blind singer of Kalevala, they would see the mythosaur, the basilisk, the Taung mask of Mandalore, but they would have to venture to the very edge of the dome to see them. It was not a short walk, but a trip that Satine was told could take close to an hour—an hour just to go see the stars. They would have to venture to the edge of a toxic desert just to see the stars and the sky, look under night upon the world their ancestors poisoned.

 _Why does everything always feel so fragile_? Satine wondered wearily, trying her best to ignore her sister’s curious eyes, at least for the moment. During the wars, they had lived in what was essentially a glorified bunker, the sky denied to them for months at a time. Living under a metal dome in Sundari did not sound so different, though what they needed protection from was not bombs or blaster fire, but the very planet itself. But in Sundari, if there was an attack, or if the air filtration system failed, or if something else happened… Well. Evacuating across a Kalevalan warzone was its own special kind of hair-raising, but at least on Kalevala, evacuees did not have to worry about growing sick from the soil they trod upon.

 _How many times have our people found themselves on the very brink of oblivion, and never realized they were hurtling towards it until one foot found empty air instead of ground? We’ll fight each other into extinction and jaundiced memory if something does not change._ The great weight of history was not exactly on Satine’s side, and still, she thought, _Something must change_.

Satine did eventually have to break the silence that had fallen between herself and her sister. There was something expectant, verging on impatient, crawling over Bo-Katan’s face, and that was as obvious a cue as Satine had ever seen. As such, she sighed slightly, and inclined her head. “Bo-Katan, I need you to listen to me. Things are going to be very… different for us now. Some things, easier; others, much more difficult. Certainly, things will never be the _same_.

“One day, if nothing happens—“ _If Father is not deposed, if I do not die before him, if blood-hunger does not prove the death of us all_ “—I shall be Duchess of Mandalore. You might be my advisor, the captain of my guards.” _My heir, if you outlive our sister, and I have no children of my own._ Satine smiled without joy. “They say the war is over, but where we are going, another kind of war has been raging for centuries, and I doubt the warriors in _that_ arena even noticed the cease-fire. There, wars are fought with words, with favors owed and extracted, with smiles and backtalk and blackmail. We will both have to be just as careful there as we would on any battlefield.”

Bo-Katan nodded. To Satine’s surprise—though maybe she shouldn’t have been so surprised—her sister did not seem to have any trouble with the information she’d just been given. “Because we’re children?”

“Yes, that’s right. People will look at us and assume that because we are children, we are easily tricked, easily lied to. We will have to prove them wrong, and I don’t think it will be easy, but…” Satine smiled again, and this time, she could find some semblance of a smile’s sentiments to infuse it with. “Nothing worthwhile ever is. ‘The work that lasts forever is the work of a lifetime, not a day.’”

That was one of their mother’s favorite quotations, from the work of a philosopher whose bones had been dry dust during the rule of the Old Republic. Supposedly, he had published many books and treatises, but only one had survived to the present day. Satine had to restrain herself from pointing out the irony of this whenever her mother quoted that line.

And… and Satine did not think she would tell her sister about her and their father’s arguments. She would not tell Bo-Katan about ‘reasons’, not yet. There would be time enough for that when they were both a little older. They had both been brought up with the warrior ethos; Satine knew better than to expect that her eight-year-old sister would prove flexible enough in mind to think about ‘reasons’, to criticize, speculate, and maybe, just maybe—

“Satine.”

Satine’s gaze had drifted away from Bo-Katan. When she looked back, she saw that her sister had stuck one hand out of the blanket, palm up, and that she was wearing what was perhaps the most serious look on her face that Satine had ever seen. “’We fear no toil,’” Bo-Katan intoned, her high, piping voice a strange thing to give to such old words. “’We fear no hardship as long as we are true to each other, true to ourselves.’”

It took Satine’s mind a moment to respond, to _process_. They had never said these words before; they were old words, and children seldom had purpose for them. But her heart began to pound arrhythmically in her chest, a slightly breathless smile stole over her face, and she tried to quell the ache in her heart when she felt how mismatched their hands were in size, as she laid her palm down on top of her sister’s.

“’We shall fear no shadow,’” they said together, “’and be cowed by no lies. We know our own hearts, and we know that our hearts are true. Any challenge you set before us, we accept with joy, for the future belongs to us, and we will shape it as we deem best.’”

It was as good a benediction as any for a new life.


End file.
